Grade: B-
Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson and Kerry Washington
Premise: A bounty hunter frees a slave to help him find a trio of wanted criminals, and after completing the mission agrees to help the slave find his long-lost wife.
Rated R for Strong bloody violence and gore, strong language (including multiple racial slurs), intense emotional content, brief graphic nudity, and a few torture-related images
My problem with Quentin Tarantino’s movies is not that they’re violent. As a red-blooded, American male movie fan, I’m always up for some butt-kicking, shoot-em-up Action Jackson stuff. It’s not even that the man’s movies are different with a capital D—on the contrary, it’s nice to see movies that don’t take themselves too seriously, that are unique and cheeky stabs at different genres, brimming with quirky dialogue and surprising plot twists that make your typical horror movies, romantic comedies and inspiring true story movies seem all the more bland and perfunctory. No, my problem with Tarantino’s movies can be summarized in one word: excess. I’ve seen five of his films—1994’s Pulp Fiction, 2003’s Kill Bill: Volume 1, 2004’s Volume 2, 2009’s Inglorious Basterds, and now Django Unchained, which came out on Christmas Day of last year—and all of them were at least two hours long (Pulp, Django and Basterds all exceeded two-and-a-half), and all of them could have been shortened by at least twenty minutes. All were stuffed to the brim with sly jokes, cutting sarcasm, ringing irony and intersecting plotlines, the likes of which you wouldn’t see anywhere else. And all of them overuse (and I do mean OVER. USE.) violence to the point of absurdity, to the point of drawing perverse giggles from the audience. There’s no denying the man is a craftsman, that his movies are truly unique and interesting, that actors trip over themselves to get into his films and then come back for second and third tastes—Tarantino’s movies are always events. But, after sitting through the two-hour-forty-five minute Django Unchained, I’m impressed but weary. Too much of a good thing, you might say.
Plot
One frigid night in Texas, circa 1858, a pair of armed men leading a troupe of chained slaves is stopped by a traveling dentist, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2009 for his multilingual role in Basterds), who’s hunting a trio of miscreant cowboys who have a bounty on their heads. When Schultz determines that one of the chained slaves, Django (Jamie Foxx), knows the men he’s seeking and could recognize them by sight, he offers to buy him. When the slave traders refuse, he kills them, unlocks all the slaves, and takes Django with him. A bounty hunter, Schultz takes Django deep into the plantation lands of the south, where they not only find and collect the reward on the men in question—the ‘Brittle brothers’—but also bond when Django admits his real driving goal is finding his wife, beautiful fellow slave Bromhilda (Kerry Washington). When Schultz agrees to help Django find her, they set out, and because she not only derives her name from an old German legend but also speaks fluent German, she actually proves trackable. But it turns out Bromhilda is the property of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a brutal, pompous eccentric who rules a sprawling old family plantation, Candieland. And of course, he has no intention of selling any of his slaves, let alone one unique enough to speak German. Their quest ultimately becomes a match of wits and a race against time as they try to find a way to nonchalantly buy Bromhilda from Candie before Calvin’s head servant (Samuel L. Jackson) finds out why they’re trying to trick his master, and before local unrest over the sight of a well-dressed black man on a horse explodes.
What Works?
Whatever their flaws, Tarantino movies always come equipped with a high entertainment factor, courtesy of rollicking soundtracks, absurd comic situations, show-stopping sight gags, crackling suspense, and a steady undercurrent of knowing, winking humor. Django also contains some attractive visuals (sprawling plantations, snowy mountain-scapes).
But, of course, it’s the characters that always make Tarantino movies memorable, and Django is no different in that regard. As the title character, Jamie Foxx gives his best performnace since his Oscar-winning portrayal of Ray Charles in 2004’s Ray; always aware he’s a black man in a white man’s world, Django oozes rage and hurt—there’s a spectacular scene where Django interrupts the whipping of a young slave girl and whips the daylights out of the white man who was inflicting the punishment. Foxx’s face and body light up with the anger and drama of the moment. And as his object of utmost desire, Ray costar Kerry Washington has a small role but nonetheless wins the audience’s sympathy and care; we want to see her freed and reunited with Django.
Already an Oscar winner thanks to his previous collaboration with Tarantino, Christoph Waltz has snagged this film’s lone acting nomination for this year in the Best Supporting Actor category (he won the Golden Globe already, as well). And while I will say no one can deliver a line in the English language with more panache and delightful I’m-smarter-than-you-and-I-know-it nuance, his being nominated over his other costars is a big surprise, and something of a disappointment. That’s not to fault the ever-watchable Waltz, but it’s because the film’s middle segment is completely stolen by Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson. A Golden Globe nominee, the always-admirable DiCaprio is firing on all cylinders scene as Calvin, putting his knack for accents, intensity, and explosive, raging, screaming drama at the fore of his portrayal, which is a stunning and instantly-memorable scene-stealer. The actor will always be associated with Titanic because of that film’s groundbreaking box office and pop culture success, but here, even more than in his twin coming-into-his-own 2006 leading roles (in The Departed and Blood Diamond), DiCaprio shows that you don’t have to be defined by one role, even one in a superduper megahit. It’s not easy to connect the sadistic, frothing-at-the-mouth Calvin with the fresh-faced dreamboat artist of Titanic (Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games actors hoping to have careers free of typecasting, take note). Speaking of actors connected to one role, Django Unchained may be the first movie Samuel L. Jackson has made since Pulp Fiction in which he’s not lampooning his classic Jules Winfield role. Though he does his share of yelling and cursing (which is what we all expect from Jackson), the actor’s hunched posture and sarcastic-servant-mumblings actually took me back to Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy from Gone With the Wind—I guess we’re not used to seeing the intense, loud-mouthed actor in a submissive servant role, but he puts his whole heart into it. Jackson
Thus, I feel cheated by the Oscars. I can't believe DiCaprio got missed for such a wowzer of a performance, but either he or Jackson would have made a much more interesting nominee than Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln), Alan Arkin (Argo) or Robert DeNiro (Silver Linings Playbook) all of whom felt to me as though they were essentially playing themselevs.
What Doesn’t Work?
First of all, Django is long, and it feels long. I believe they could have cut a good forty-five minutes out of this film and made a perfectly-entertaining two-hour movie. I especially believe this because the last thirty minutes are just a shoot-em-up bloodfest, just as the last acts of Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds were. I quickly became overwhelmed and annoyed by the sheer amount of blood spraying and splattering, and by the amount of people being killed (especially when some of them—particularly the cold-blooded shooting of a white female character—are played for laughs). And also, while Tarantino’s humorous touches are often funny, a few scenes are dragged out so long they just feel like desperate gimmicks, particularly a narrative-stopping scene involving a Jonah Hill cameo and a Ku Klux Klan gathering.
Though I appreciate the type of knowing wit that fills Waltz’s lines, I do wish this film was done just a little more seriously.
Content
It’s Tarantino. Dozens of people get shot in the head, chest, legs, and crotch in bloody shootouts, a man gets ripped apart by dogs, people get whipped and beaten, and people bludgeon each other in a sickening, bare-flesh to-the-death wrestling match. There’s a fair amount of cussing (Samuel L. Jackson is in this movie, remember), but it’s the shocking, desensitizing gore that you’ll remember.
Bottom Line (I Promise):
It’s Tarantino. You’ll see things you’ve never seen, and you’ll hear things you’ve never heard. Django is entertaining, and driven by some bravura performances, but it can be a little too much.
Django Unchained (2012)
Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Rated R
Length: 165 minutes
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